I Am the Dead, Who, You Take Care of Me - by Anthony McCann (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

With tender attention and a keenly embodied curiosity, the poems in I am the dead, who, you take care of me are acutely aware of the ways in which language communes the living and the dead.

Following the poet's recent prose work on the historical and ecological conflicts of the American West, these poems are necrosocial biomes where the living play dead and the dead bite back. Here we find that the past is "a perfect copy of the land./ But with all the panic of the meat." By situating himself among lyric poets such as Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and Amiri Baraka, Anthony McCann reveals how poetry can be both an unnerving and enlivening sort of devotion. "I want life/but for the living" he writes. By turns playful, mournful, and darkly humorous, these are works which ultimately leave us emboldened in their wake.

Review Quotes

McCann examines our attachment to the physical world and uses this to build a bridge to the metaphysical; in his undulating world, the physical self is a gift, one that gives us a hand to feel that pulse, a shape in all the noise. --Publishers Weekly

McCann demonstrates that the truth surrounds us all; our best way of connecting with it is through compassion and love. With equal parts exuberance and dread, the speaker encourages us to "waste the whole day feeling these things." --Nate Pritts, Boston Review

You might not "get" exactly what he is saying but you will feel what he is meaning. You will be moved by something pre-historic and radiant. Which is to say: you will be moved by this mysterious, lyric, ecstatic thing: poetry. --Matthew Dickman, Tin House

About the Author

Anthony McCann was born and raised in the Hudson Valley. He is the author of Thing Music (Wave Books, 2014), I ♥ Your Fate (Wave Books, 2011), Moongarden (Wave Books, 2006) and Father of Noise (Fence Books, 2003). In addition to these three collections, he is one of the authors of Gentle Reader! (2007), a book of erasures of the English Romantics, along with Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the University of California-Riverside's Palm Desert MFA program. He is the "Poet Laureate" of Machine Project and also teaches courses at the California Institute of the Arts.